-PDF Download- Nineteenth Century Southern Women Writers EBOOK

Nineteenth-Century Southern Women Writers

Author: Melissa Walker Heidari

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-08-12

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1000586944

The essays in this book explore the role of Grace King’s fiction in the movement of American literature from local color and realism to modernism and show that her work exposes a postbellum New Orleans that is fragmented socially, politically, and linguistically. In her introduction, Melissa Walker Heidari examines selections from King’s journals and letters as views into her journey toward a modernist aesthetic—what King describes in one passage as "the continual voyage I made." Sirpa Salenius sees King’s fiction as a challenge to dominant conceptualizations of womanhood and a reaction against female oppression and heteronormativity. In his analysis of "An Affair of the Heart," Ralph J. Poole highlights the rhetoric of excess that reveals a social satire debunking sexual and racial double standards. Ineke Bockting shows the modernist aspects of King’s fiction through a stylistic analysis which explores spatial, temporal, biological, psychological, social, and racial liminalities. Françoise Buisson demonstrates that King’s writing "is inspired by the Southern oral tradition but goes beyond it by taking on a theatrical dimension that can be quite modern and even experimental at times." Kathie Birat claims that it is important to underline King’s relationship to realism, "for the metonymic functioning of space as a signifier for social relations is an important characteristic of the realist novel." Stéphanie Durrans analyzes "The Story of a Day" as an incest narrative and focuses on King’s development of a modernist aesthetics to serve her terrifying investigation into social ills as she probes the inner world of her silent character. Amy Doherty Mohr explores intersections between regionalism and modernism in public and silenced histories, as well as King’s treatment of myth and mobility. Brigitte Zaugg examines in "The Little Convent Girl" King’s presentation of the figure of the double and the issue of language as well as the narrative voice, which, she argues, "definitely inscribes the text, with its understatement, economy and quiet symbolism, in the modernist tradition." Miki Pfeffer closes the collection with an afterword in which she offers excerpts from King’s letters as encouragement for "scholars to seek Grace King as a primary source," arguing that "Grace King’s own words seem best able to dialogue with the critical readings herein." Each of these essays enables us to see King’s place in the construction of modernity; each illuminates the "continual voyage" that King made.

Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South

Author: Jonathan Daniel Wells

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-10-24

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1139503499

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The first study to focus on white and black women journalists and writers both before and after the Civil War, this book offers fresh insight into Southern intellectual life, the fight for women's rights and gender ideology. Based on new research into Southern magazines and newspapers, this book seeks to shift scholarly attention away from novelists and toward the rich and diverse periodical culture of the South between 1820 and 1900. Magazines were of central importance to the literary culture of the South because the region lacked the publishing centers that could produce large numbers of books. As editors, contributors, correspondents and reporters in the nineteenth century, Southern women entered traditionally male bastions when they embarked on careers in journalism. In so doing, they opened the door to calls for greater political and social equality at the turn of the twentieth century.

The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers

Author: Hollis Robbins

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2017-07-25

Total Pages: 673

ISBN-13: 0143130676

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A landmark collection documenting the social, political, and artistic lives of African American women throughout the tumultuous nineteenth century. Named one of NPR's Best Books of 2017. The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers is the most comprehensive anthology of its kind: an extraordinary range of voices offering the expressions of African American women in print before, during, and after the Civil War. Edited by Hollis Robbins and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., this collection comprises work from forty-nine writers arranged into sections of memoir, poetry, and essays on feminism, education, and the legacy of African American women writers. Many of these pieces engage with social movements like abolition, women’s suffrage, temperance, and civil rights, but the thematic center is the intellect and personal ambition of African American women. The diverse selection includes well-known writers like Sojourner Truth, Hannah Crafts, and Harriet Jacobs, as well as lesser-known writers like Ella Sheppard, who offers a firsthand account of life in the world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers. Taken together, these incredible works insist that the writing of African American women writers be read, remembered, and addressed. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century

Author: Jonathan Daniel Wells

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2011-12-12

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0807138533

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century provides a series of provocative essays reflecting innovative, original research on professional and commercial interests in a region often seen as composed of just two classes -- planters and slaves. This study shows, however, that the active middle class, devoted to cultural and economic modernization of the region, worked in tandem with its northern counterpart, and independently, to bring reforms to the South.

The Female Tradition in Southern Literature

Author: Carol S. Manning

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780252064449

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This collection of critical essays examines the contributions to and influences on literature that have been made by Southern women writers.--From publisher description.

The Belle Gone Bad

Author: Betina Entzminger

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2002-07-01

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9780807128367

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

When Scarlett O’Hara fluttered her dark lashes, did she threaten only the gentleman in her parlor or the very culture that produced her? Examining the “bad belle” as a recurring character, The Belle Gone Bad finds that white southern women writers from the antebellum period to the present have used treacherous belles to subtly indict their culture from within. Combining the southern ideal of ladyhood with the sexual power of the dark seductress, the bad belle is the perfect figure with which to critique a culture that effectively enslaved both its white and black women. Betina Entzminger traces the development of the bad belle from nineteenth-century domestic novelist E.D.E.N. Southworth to contemporary novelist Kaye Gibbons. Coy and alluring like the traditional southern belle, the bad belle is also manipulative and knowing; the men subject to her cultivated charms often meet disastrous ends. By making the patriarch vulnerable to women who outwardly conform to the limiting conventions of womanhood but inwardly break all the rules, these writers challenged a society that stereotyped black women as promiscuous and forced white women onto pedestals while committing heinous acts in their name. Representations of the bad belle evolved along with southern society, and by the late twentieth century, many women writers expressed emancipation through the literal or figurative destruction of corrupt or would-be belles. The Belle Gone Bad shows that even writers who have been critically dismissed as too domestic or conservative to be innovative did—through the strategy of the bad belle character—challenge southern institutions and conceptions about race, class, and gender. What unites the dangerous belles created by several generations of women writing in the South, old and new, is their liberating potential.

Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers

Author: Karen L. Kilcup

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Published: 1997-02-18

Total Pages: 656

ISBN-13: 9780631199861

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: An Anthology is a multicultural, multigenre collection celebrating the quality and diversity of nineteenth century American women's expression.

Activist Sentiments

Author: Pier Gabrielle Foreman

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 0252076648

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Examining how nineteenth-century Black women writers engaged radical reform, sentiment and their various readerships

Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century

Author: Hilary Fraser

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-09-04

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1107075750

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book examines women's art writing in the nineteenth century, challenging the idea of art history as a masculine intellectual field.

Making a Stand

Author: Emily Watkins Allen

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The South has undergone much political and economic change throughout the twentieth century, but surprisingly, social expectations have to a certain extent maintained traditional gender roles. Six novels published since the Southern Renaissance document the conflict of tradition with personal strength: Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind, Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit, The Annunciation by Ellen Gilchrist, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and The Color Purple by Alice Walker. White women are presented as Southern belles, while black women, largely as a result of white expectations, also remain subject to nineteenth century social values. The ideal black slave was a stereotype of the devoted child, caring, naive, but inherently stupid. White women are encouraged towards those characteristics deemed attractive to men---charm, beauty, social respectability, and the ability to bear and raise progeny. This expectation of sexuality also leads to suspicion: the Madonna-whore dichotomy emerges for white women, and black women are on one hand expected to bear children, and on the other held to white society's concern for chastity and personal reputation. The Southern belle remains a symbol of the region; therefore, a study of Southern social expectations since the Civil War reflects the changes it has undergone. While the white woman is still subject to these values, and has traditionally been presented as victimized by them, there is a theme in modern Southern literature of personal exploration and awakening despite the restrictive values of the dominant society. Black woman too attempt to create a new image of the feminine ideal by living by opposite values. These characteristics of intelligence independence, courage, determination and drive are not "normal" for Southern women, and to a certain extent must be learned or relearned in any quest for identity and personal strength. Living in spite of society's insistence that women remain submissive demands the repudiation of certain aspects of the South's culture. The experience of the individual determines the lengths to which these women go to make personal stands. Some women choose to rebel against the South within the South while others physically move away from undesirable cultural influences altogether; those that move away do not, however, instantly become free of their past.